I found Erving Goffman’s theory about status, roles
and self-label to be very interesting. He describes status to be your position
that you hold within society. Goffman said that your roles are the behaviors
that go along with your particular status and your self-label is how you
present yourself to others, given your said status and roles within society. I
found these three concepts and how they interact, something that I still see in
today’s society. An example that I can think of is if someone is a pastor for a
church, his status would be a pastor. His specific roles could be things like
preaching on Sundays to his congregation, offering guidance to members of his
church and doing baptisms and weddings. The self-label that he might put
forward will vary from pastor to pastor, but most pastors will present themselves
professionally, and in an unbiased and welcoming way. I believe that these
three ideas that Goffman has put forth can apply to every single person in our
society, except each person will have varying ideas and aspects that go into
their status, roles and self-label.
Branching off of Goffman’s idea of the self-label,
he says that stigmas are something that can come based on the self-label that
you show to other people. Goffman described a stigma as something that society
places on a person based on their presentation of their self-label that could
prevent the person from achieving a goal that they may have. An example used in
class was the fact that out of all of the CEOs, only 4.4% of them are females.
Given the fact that someone is a woman sometimes places a stigma on her that
would prevent her from reaching her goal of becoming a CEO. Obviously this
phenomenon is not fair, but I do think that it is something that happens all of
the time in many different situations.
The video that I picked is a funny (yet true) rap
that people made up about Goffman’s theory, to go along with the theme song
from the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. I thought that it was a short and concise
representation of Goffman’s ideas about the presentation of the self, so I felt
that it was appropriate to share it with all of you.
Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvuWLuAW8gw
This blog was very interesting and I thought you did a very good job explaining Goffman's theory of status, role and the self-label. I thought the example of females within our society and how many are CEO's was very helpful in understanding stigma within a culture. The video clip was also very interesting and I thought it fit very well with Goffman's ideas.
ReplyDeleteI like how you used the example of a preacher to help explain Goffman's ideas of status and roles. I also like that you used the example from class of how less than 5% of females are CEO's and this can be due to stigmas that get in the way of achieving the same goals as a males. Nice post, which I felt clearly described Goffman's ideas
ReplyDeleteI agree that the video a good representation of his ideas. I think your blog also did a good job summarizing Goffman, great examples!
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